Music - Tribes and Unity

 From The Sun Magazine, Open Ears: Kelefa Sanneh On What Popular Music Can Teach Us About Each Other by Finn Cohen:

Cohen: Do you think music offers some hope for mending the cultural division in our country?

Sanneh: It offers a way to see the upsides of division. That human process of cleaving into separate tribes is inseparable from the sense of belonging that we seek. To create a community, you have to include some people and exclude others. And if you’re going to create a space that feels intimate, not all 8 billion humans can be in it. You need those two forces: inclusion and exclusion. At different times and in different places you might emphasize one or the other. Say you listen to music that sounds harsh, noisy, and unpleasant to most people. You might belong to this tribe where, in theory, everyone’s welcome, but part of the appeal is that not everyone will want to join. We find this exclusivity in all music communities.

In a politically partisan view, there are only two groups in America today, and they are big. All sorts of people are going to be in my coalition, and we’re going to define ourselves against the people in the other coalition. When you zoom in, you see more fracturing. Depending on how you define it, you might see the country in 2023 as having fewer of those small, exclusive groups than it once did; through social media we’re in conversation with each other more, and sometimes it feels like you’re at a party where you’re hearing every conversation at once. But that lack of separation can cause conflict. Thirty years ago you didn’t know that some random person halfway across the country disagreed with you about something.

There are some complex things in the whole interview, I have to wonder if it has not always been a bit tribal in what music we listened to - disco versus rock versus pop; white versus black; metal versus punk, and so on and so on. Plenty of us listened to all kinds of things. Others just what was on the radio. But that last sentence seems to me to be the big difference\between I was young and now.

I give you a take on this issue from decades ago by Pete Townsend:

Anybody can wear leather....

I always thought this was a song about unity, and the enemies of that unity:

And this one about the falsity of drawing false lines:

One for the road - it's what you do… who says who can't do what?

 

sch 7/7